By As of Tuesday an Ethereum (ETH) 2.0 Proof-of-Stake testnet beacon blockchain has gone live. Co-founder of the sharding development firm Prysmatic Labs announced the development via Medium post on May 7th.
As reported by Coinbeat, Ethereum 2.0 is the upcoming new ethereum chain which boasts improvements in security, scalability, and of course, decentralization. Ethereum 2.0 will not be implemented to the current ETH network via a hard fork. Users will instead have the ability to transfer value from the current Proof-of-Work (PoW) chain via a one-way smart contract.
Furthermore, the announcement also notes that shards are one of the core concepts behind Ethereum 2.0. In a nutshell, a shard is an individual chain which manages smart contracts, transactions. Shards remain in a state of constant coordination by means of a root chain which is known as the beacon chain.
Van Loon, explains the benefits of implementing shards:
“Having shards allows for horizontal scalability of the system, as transactions can be processed in parallel compared to the current Ethereum Proof-of-Work chain.”
In addition to this, Loon also claims that the testnet is accessible to the public and also links to the dedicated guide website which provides the explanations on how to begin staking. However, the current version of the testnet does include support for smart contracts, only has one client so far and features a configuration which is different from what is to come from the mainnet ETH 2.0.
Core devs at Ethereum stated last week that the code for the first stage of the transition to a PoS consensus algorithm could be completed as soon as the end of June.
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